IntroductionSince the dawn of the Industrial Revolution human society has undergone some tremendous change. The quality of life is better in many aspects as we are living longer, working more varied careers and making use of technology to make our lives a lot easier. With longer life and a more varied living environment staying-in-touch with family, friends, colleagues and all of those that touch our lives is becoming more important. One essential medium that has made this process very easy is a web application known as Facebook. The Facebook platform is providing a wide variety of assistance for staying in contact but at the same rate causing quite a stir with its social capabilities. Simply, it has emerged as society’s most prominent communication tool. We will dive further into this phenomenon to see why Facebook has achieved this status and why today’s society deems it important. Facebook (originally named thefacebook) was built in 2004 by three Harvard students that wanted to reach out and get to know students from other dorms. Those students – Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz started it out as a small project. The web site allowed a user to sign-up for an account for free. With an account one could add other users as friends, look up old friends and colleagues, send messages, join groups, and more. The idea proved so popular that it soon spread to other ivy-league schools such as Stanford, Yale, and Columbia (Yadav, 2006). Unlike other social networking web sites at the time – Facebook offered a more private environment focusing primarily on the varied relationships and interactions of people throughout their lives. With web sites such as Myspace, Bebo, Friendster, and Yahoo! 360 membership was very open to anyone that wanted to join. Facebook originally deferred from that trend because it targeted only college students. By having a.edu e-mail address, college students were granted privilege to join, as were alumni who also kept their college e-mail addresses. Facebook's target audience and restricted membership limited its growth. By only allowing college students to join, it wiped out access to high school students, parents, adults, professionals and more. This however was very appealing to the target audience because it meant college students and only college students would be participating and allowed to join the mix. Just how many college students actually use the application though? Facebook’s Chris Hughes has been stated in an article posted on TechCrunch , that 85% of college students are using Facebook whereas 60% are logging-in daily (www.techcrunch.com). Facebook shines above other social networking web sites and former methods of communication by providing communication in a matter of seconds, choosing who may access your content, giving users an easily organized list of their contacts at their disposal, and even ways to describe how and why people are acquainted with you. Messages can be sent frequently at no cost. Not only can you easily organize your contacts, but you may also keep up-to-date with the happenings of your comrades through mini-feeds or “story-feeds” through your Facebook homepage. These feeds are essentially just lists of updated news items, such as relationship statuses, personal news, whose friends with who, or even if your friend joins a group. The information is readily available and posted after a few minutes within the feed. As stated earlier, users can set the privacy of their account – manning full control of who can see which segments of content or personal information about the user. This is what truly sets it apart from other social networking web sites. Photo Credit: http://www.sportsjournalists.co.uk/blog/?p=740
What This Research Project Is AboutGreetings to you all, My name is Bobby Hash and I'm a senior at Radford Univeristy. I shall be graduating this December with a BS degree in Media Studies emphasized in web-design. Over the course of this semester I have been working on a project for MSTD 335 - Media & Society. |
Facebook’s popularity has increased tremendously since its creation. Due to marketing influence and the lure of high dollar investments, Facebook finally opened its doors to the public, allowing anyone to join. With that one move, its membership has surged since July 2006, moving from 7.5 million users to well over 18.5 million users through January 2007, a 300 percent increase. It has not stopped since then, growing to over 36 million users as of August (Vogelstein, 2007) and 42 million nearing October (AFP, 2007). Facebook’s use is even more evident as Facebook is receiving 30 billion page views monthly, whereas comScore ranks Facebook as the 6th most trafficked US site. (Abram, C). It is also currently ranked on the Alexa Web Search web site as the 5 th most trafficked site in the United States, behind YouTube, Myspace, Yahoo!, and the almighty Google. The United States isn’t the only country that has fell in love with the platform as it ranks at number 1 in Canada and number 2 in both the United Kingdom and Turkey (Alexa, 2007).